Comment by ckoepp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ckoepp | Hacker News Reader

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You are not the only one criticizing IQ tests. Even Theodor Adorno had his problems with those tests. Some even claim that the whole IQ research is not very scientific at all. An IQ test for example is considered good if there is a Gaussian distribution present in the results it produces when applied to a large set of people. However, we still don't know if human intelligence is actually Gaussian distributed. The only proof you can find are such IQ tests, which actually are designed with this very pattern in mind. It's like asking a question with the answer already in mind.

I guess with the creation of phrases like "emotional IQ" and "cognitive IQ" even the research expressed its doubt that those tests can truly hold their promises. Freerk Huisken might be right in the end. He argued that it's a logical problem when one is trying to measure intelligence in artificial test as they can not retrieve the true capabilities of a human. Intelligence is a damn complicated subject and although we humans love to measure and categorize everything, we should consider that IQ tests are far from being comparable. Truth is, we still do not understand what intelligence actually is :)

This is actually a nice topic to discuss with philosophers.

Speaking as someone whose exposure to intelligence testing comes second-hand via a psychology graduate student, my understanding is that the quality of an IQ test is just based on how well it correlates with other IQ tests. The distribution always looks normal because they normalize it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29#P...

We may not understand what intelligence is philosophically, but in the field of psychology, IQ/general intelligence/g factor is a statistical construct that isn't directly measurable but can be inferred by its correlation with measurable factors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis

When we give someone an IQ test we give them a made up set of problems to solve. We hope that if someone can solve these made up problems they will be better at solving problems that real life throws at them.

When we look at the research we find that if we know someone's score on an IQ test(how well they solve made up problems) we find they tend to do a little better(on average) at life then people who aren't as good at solving made-up problems. This is not meant to be the full measure of a man, or supposed to tell us the answer to what intelligence is.(This is probably a question a bunch of tenured philosophers could argue about until the end of civilization :) ).

The pro IQ argument I hear is that nothing else predicts success in life as well.

One must wonder how much that has to do with our individualist society that tries to assign rewards to individuals instead of emphasizing group cooperation and communal advancement. In a society that freely shares, would IQ be as powerful a predictor?

An intelligence test for groups of people would be a very interesting idea.

Wow, this is such an out-of-left field but excellent idea. I personally spent most of my formative years in a culture that wasn't as individualistic as american culture so the IQ test having such an implicit individualistic bias to it is fascinating to me.

Right, IMHO QI test (and the brain teasers, anyways) could be used, but as a small part of a more complex process -- like, what about giving the applicant a real problem to work on? Unless you don't have enough time to make a hire, but in this case, well, good luck then.

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